All That's Beautiful Drifts Away

The Wall Street Journal ^ | November 13, 2003 | JOHN GROSS

[OESY]

It was one of W.B. Yeats's deepest beliefs that a true poet always writes out of his personal life, but only after his experience has been transmuted into a myth. "He is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete."

[OESY]

W.B. YEATS, By R.F. Foster (Oxford, 798 pages, $45)

Occult beliefs, a Nobel Prize, the whirligig of politics . . . and the late, great poems.

[yankeedog]

Thanks for posting this. I've been waiting for this book to come out.